Showing posts with label fun. Show all posts

@Simona_Halep’s win is an amazing victory and an event we’ll be remembering and talking about at least until her next Grand Slam.  Sadly, it was only hours before all those hungry to for publicity started to throw shade, claim ownership and speculate it for their own nefarious ends.

This is an (Austro?-)German movie shortlisted for the Foreign Oscar and filmed in Bucharest. It’s great and rated 7.6 on IMDB, with a Metascore of 93. It is also remarkably warm and positive toward Romania.

Recently, one of the few blogs I read went off-line, after publishing one episode of their epic sagas. It’s [sort of] about Dacians, and as a sign of solidarity, I’ve decided to give the non-Romanian world an idea about it.

The name would be longer, but I’m running out of space and patience. I don’t care much about MihaElan (yes, she lost the “n” but kept the “Schwartzenberg”) MRRR née Tiganu and yet the scandals she so often gets into have a dimension that has not really been explored in Romania, a dimension I find very interesting: women seem to be far more interested in her (both accusing and defending) than men. Why would that be? The other thing that irks me is censorship – something we should all fight foragainst, whether it comes from Mihaela Radulescu or from her post-op model Zoso. 

As I was telling you, my sense of humour is a bit niche and, coupled with my allergy to inconsistency, it may result in comments some people may consider a "flame" or trolling. I may be turning in Fouad, the joke-explaining-Indian in Family Guy.

I recently got an article from our very own Blegoo, who wanted to see his thoughts published and critiqued around here. It required serious formatting, but I thought it’s a free service I can provide to the second highest commenter (in terms of quantity) on this blog. My comments will be highlighted inline and concentrated at the end. 

It has recently come to my attention that today is St Andrew's day and also Scotland National Day. Tomorrow is Romania's. Or, since it’s unlikely I’ll finish this article and publish it today, subtract one day from all the temporal adverbs above. We will also learn here who put the ‘X’ in XXX.

(I’d place the last word of the title in quotation marks, but they’d get escaped, causing the title to look silly.) Recently, Francois Hollande, the French president who looks like a Mickey Mouse (not Victor Ponta, the real, trademarked one), allowed the press to take photos of him and his lover. I suspect the show is put on so that the French people can convince themselves that they still have a heterosexual president. "Is his lover a woman? Are you sure? Well, then we can keep drinking wine, eating cheese and live long!" Meanwhile, I'm annoyed as hell that a friend of mine won't (or pretends she does not) get my jokes.

I have to admit, I don't quite keep up with Romanian music. My favourite groups are rather old, and I only hear about Romanian stars when they are too big and of dubious quality (e.g., Inna).

I’ve hinted before on my personal struggle with answering such philosophical questions as “where are you from?” or “where were you born.” As I started answering with “Dacia,” more and more of those asking me, unsatisfied with this answer, started to look it up. One such acquaintance, a Brazilian dude, was kind enough to let me record our conversation. So I made a movie to share it more easily (like the Jens interview).

I am one of the remaining few who remembers life before the Internet. It was cloudy. And back in those times, good, watchable, fun commercials were few and far in-between.

There was a time when I considered myself vegetarian. It was easy, a very close friend was cooking while I was buying our food. These days I cook my own food and since my time is limited, I gravitate toward simple recipes. With that in mind, there's been a long time since I haven't presented a recipe here, so I'll be telling you about my favorite winter soup (which is more like a borsht), the lentil soup. And since it’s been a while since I wrote in Romanian, I’ll do it again, but you can find the English version below, in Sources.

N/O stands for Night Out, but you can read it as "NO jazz for the masses" since jazz will never have the same audience and mass appeal as manele, for instance. I suspect that with jazz, you never quite know what to expect (even with a band or soloist you have heard before), whereas manele and other more “popular” genres deliver a more consistent listener / dancer experience.

A more recent politico-artistico-philosophical scandal, far more interesting to me but, apparently, less interesting to the Romanian public, is the open conflict between Andrei Plesu, my favourite philosesseist, and the PSD cultural wing.

This could very well be a paid post, but it's not (unless you consider a free concert and a couple of Pepsi bottles as 'payment'). I was just passing by their tent and the music caught my ear; I enjoyed it while watching a cover of Talking Heads (Psycho Killer). All in all, a great opportunity to reminisce on what Pepsi meant in my childhood.

Writing about the voting experience would be way too uninteresting even for me, especially since it was straightforward and uneventful, so rather than doing just that, I’ll be telling you about how the voting went, some food I bought and my “participation” in Doors Open Toronto 2014.

About a week ago I watched a number of TV series and movies worth discussing. One of them was about the Brits and the war, and it is somehow connected, in my mind, to UKIP and Farage.

A while back, in the “Hier spricht der FerienPunkt, Kostinesti!” article, I tried to figure out the song behind the “Radio Vacanta” generic was and I failed (nor could I find it elsewhere). If there’s one motto to my existence (or at least to my self-image), that’s never give up.

This having been started as a Romanian blog, I first wrote what to do in Amsterdam when you’re alive in Romanian, with a friend, as an exquisite corpse. Recently, I met yet another Dutch girl who gave me more than one smile, so in return, I figured I'd give the world the translated version.

I recently indulged in a counselling experience on Facebook and I thought I might share with you part of it.